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July Part-Time Work Jumps by 393,000; Full-Time Employment Down 54,000

Today’s establishment survey shows jobs rose by a stronger than expected 209,000. Revisions were not a factor, subtracting 7,000 in May and adding 9,000 in June.

In the household survey, employment rose by 345,000. However, voluntary part-time employment rose by a whopping 469,000 while part-time for economic reasons dropped by 44,000.

Due to a quirk in the way the numbers are calculated, one cannot add the numbers together. The BLS says the aggregate number of part-time employees rose by 393,000 while Full-time employment fell by 54,000.

Don’t try adding any of these numbers together because the numbers will not total. However, We can say that the proper takeaway for the month is that strength was all part-time and then some.

Total nonfarm payroll employment increased by 222,000 in June, and the unemployment rate was little changed at 4.4 percent, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. Employment increased in health care, social assistance, financial activities,
and mining.

The Average Weekly Hours of all private employees remained flat at 34.5 hours. The average weekly hours of all private service-providing employees remained flat at 33.3 hours. Average weekly hours of manufacturers was flat at 40.9 hours. All are the same or within 0.1 hours from a year ago.

The Average Hourly Earnings of private workers rose $0.06 to $22.10. The average hourly earnings of private service-providing employees rose $0.05 to $21.87. Average hourly earnings of manufacturers jumped $0.12 to $20.94.

Year-over-year, private earnings are up only 2.4%. Is that really keeping up with inflation?

Starting January 2014, I dropped the Birth/Death Model charts from this report. For those who follow the numbers, I retain this caution: Do not subtract the reported Birth-Death number from the reported headline number. That approach is statistically invalid. Should anything interesting arise in the Birth/Death numbers, I will comment further.

Table 15 BLS Alternate Measures of Unemployment

Table A-15 is where one can find a better approximation of what the unemployment rate really is.

Notice I said “better” approximation not to be confused with “good” approximation.

The official unemployment rate is 4.3%. However, if you start counting all the people who want a job but gave up, all the people with part-time jobs that want a full-time job, all the people who dropped off the unemployment rolls because their unemployment benefits ran out, etc., you get a closer picture of what the unemployment rate is. That number is in the last row labeled U-6.

U-6 is much higher at 8.6%. Both numbers would be way higher still, were it not for millions dropping out of the labor force over the past few years.

Some of those dropping out of the labor force retired because they wanted to retire. The rest is disability fraud, forced retirement, discouraged workers, and kids moving back home because they cannot find a job.

Strength is Relative

It’s important to put the jobs numbers into proper perspective.

In the household survey, if you work as little as 1 hour a week, even selling trinkets on eBay, you are considered employed.

In the household survey, if you work three part-time jobs, 12 hours each, the BLS considers you a full-time employee.

In the payroll survey, three part-time jobs count as three jobs. The BLS attempts to factor this in, but they do not weed out duplicate Social Security numbers. The potential for double-counting jobs in the payroll survey is large.

Household Survey vs. Payroll Survey

The payroll survey (sometimes called the establishment survey) is the headline jobs number, generally released the first Friday of every month. It is based on employer reporting.

The household survey is a phone survey conducted by the BLS. It measures unemployment and many other factors.

If you work one hour, you are employed. If you don’t have a job and fail to look for one, you are not considered unemployed, rather, you drop out of the labor force.

Looking for jobs on Monster does not count as “looking for a job”. You need an actual interview or send out a resume.

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40 thoughts on “July Part-Time Work Jumps by 393,000; Full-Time Employment Down 54,000”

The new norm. Workers holding down 3 part-time jobs instead of one full time job to survive. A big win for employers who are able to skirt funding benefits. Make them struggle to survive and keep them poor. That’s the formula for total domination. It works great in the 3rd world.

As I recall part-time workers were not entitled to employer funded medical care prior to Obamacare.

I had relatives in part-time employment during the Bush administration who either had to piggyback on their spouse’s employment coverage or pay directly out of pocket for it.

This goes far beyond Obamacare.

It is an intentional effort to force people to make do with less.

The government isn’t even enforcing state or federal labor laws being openly violated by illegal aliens and their employers. This forces contractors who are normally law-abiding to hire cheap illegal labor to stay competitive and remain in business.

Your congressman represents his employer, the entities that fund his re-election campaigns. He (she?) is doing as he is told. As far as that goes, he IS doing his job whenever he compels the constituency to make do with less.

The same reason Congress is in the process of devising a bill to prohibit Trump of the traditional executive privilege to fire a special prosecutor – if the law does not fit the agenda of Big Money – simply repeal and replace it so it does satisfy the agenda.

I doubt it is an intentional effort to force people to make do with less. Two jobs are almost always better than one job, and it should be viewed as a positive. Two part-time jobs adds security for workers, because when one job reduces its hours or stops the other job is still there. Some income is always better than none, and two jobs is a natural buffer against total unemployment. If you are a business, two clients are better than one. Many people do part-time jobs by choice, for example wanting flexibility for family roles.

Nothing in the Bible says “Thou Shalt Work One 40 Hour a Week Job” because God commanded it and it is better than two part-time jobs. The 40-hour work week is completely arbitrary, with no underlying rationale. Indeed, the norm for a fulltime job in the EU is closer to 30 hours than 40 hours. If the law said people could only work 20 hours but had to be paid for 40 hours, then 20 hours would become the new fulltime. Entrepreneurs not bound by law to 40-hour work weeks often voluntarily work 70-80 hours. Why do we need government-enforced sameness and uniformity in the workplace, as if everything is one big assembly line and all businesses are the same? Let people work whatever number of hours they want at whatever wage they can leverage, with or without buying health insurance as they choose. The Obamacare-tax loving USA Senate should have their wages halved to part-time levels, and then be made to attach their health insurance mandate to a hot poker and shove it up their kazoos.

Hello there. Have you not encountered the phenomenon of “forced part time” yet?
Variuos business entities may “use” your labour for only 20 hours a week and yet expect you to be available 24/7. That puts a crimp in the two or more job method of self support.
Where I work, a ‘salvage’ goods retailer, the work schedule changes every week. Additionally, when the pace of sales slows, (notice the focus on funds flows and not volume of items inputted,) people are sent home early. So, your’ “safe” twenty hours a week suddenly becomes a precarious fifteen to twenty hours a week. Woe betide the ‘uppity’ worker who demands a ‘rational’ schedule so as to facilitate a workable two jobs wage stream. One very hard working single father where I work also works nights at a Big Boxx Store. When asked; “When do you sleep?” His reply is; “Whenever I can.”
Now, entrepreneurs can and will work long hours, precisely because they are hoping for the “Big Payday” when their labours come to fruition. (No mention of the roughly four in five small businesses that go under within a year or two. That’s the “rancid underbelly” of the entrepreneur myth.) Where I work, the employee handbook explicitly states that Management is expected to work fifty hours a week, and more, for their salary. When averaged out over the ‘average’ work week for the top manager where I work, that came out to roughly twelve dollars an hour. (Actual example.)
Finally, I am old enough to remember working half days on Saturday as a normal part of working for a living. The eventual social acceptance of the forty hour work week was a Godsend for many like me. Saturdays were free!!! Yaay! Now many yearn for that Saturday work, if only to earn enough to keep up with the bills.
You seem to be promoting a Libertarian World View. Fine. Just be aware that such a philosophy accepts unnecessary death and pain as a part of the “Natural Order” of things. There is nothing anywhere in such a philosophy that guarantees who the “winners” and “losers” will be. That’s the province of Theology.

Good examples, Ambrit. Capitalism is indeed a brutal system. Unfortunately, socialism is brutal in its own ways and the results are often worse. Cash flows affect both systems. Small capitalist companies unfortunately have little buffer, versus large capitalist companies and government employers. Obviously also a labor supply and demand aspect. Where labor is abundant and jobs scare, employers have more leverage to dictate terms.

“You seem to be promoting a Libertarian World View. Fine. Just be aware that such a philosophy accepts unnecessary death and pain as a part of the “Natural Order” of things. There is nothing anywhere in such a philosophy that guarantees who the “winners” and “losers” will be. That’s the province of Theology.”

Minimizing unnecessary death and pain is an interesting goal, and I certainly do not know the best way to do it. Libertarian philosophy taken to its extreme is indeed flawed, but so is everything else. Death and pain seem an integral part of the human condition or natural order, to the best of my understanding. Even if all your material needs were meet with minimal work, pain and death would still be part of the equation. Look at the lives of the rich and famous in the news. People with plenty of money often have plenty of pain, and sometimes it hastens rather than minimizes death. People in the USA are doing their best to minimize pain (e.g. with drugs, both legal and illegal). But everything they do to minimize pain seems to cause more pain and death.

Working for small companies sensitive to cash flow is something I have done, and it is indeed tough. Employee turnover is usually high, and it does not take long to get seniority. But it has been damn good experience for me, and I learned a ton that is still useful today. Political theologies seem to have replaced religious theologies in guaranteeing the winners and losers. Not sure which theology is best believed.

“The recent move to part-time jobs is not the choice of the employee. It’s being forced upon the employee by the employers and big money.”

In some cases, it is the employees choice. For example, where employees have other responsibilities like caring for children, elderly relatives, going to school, etc. Very common. Obviously in some areas, particularly more rural areas and where the general economy is depressed, generic labor choices are very limited and you are lucky to get even one part-time job. Just saying, it is not a uniform phenomena and I do not know of any “hard data” for any geographic area. My own personal belief is that there will be a labor shortage leading to increased wages if the flow of unskilled Third World workers into the USA reverses. You cannot have sanctuary cities and naturally high wages for generic labor.

No, I am not missing any points. But I am in a large urban area with lots of businesses and lots of transportation and distance issues (it can be over an hour between jobs). Also I do not believe that any of this is permanent, and that when the opportunity arises some part-time workers will go fulltime and others will stay part-time by choice. I know people who have 3 part-time jobs (each with a different wage) and even negotiated health benefits and schedule vacations. Even in the fast food industry, I know workers earning more money with multiple part-time gigs than an equivalent fulltime job. In the real world, you have to schedule yourself for more than 40 hours of part-time work, partly for a higher weekly income than a fulltime job and partly to buffer against employers reducing hours. Talked to one restaurant guy last week where he was laid off from one job in a college area on vacation, and increased his other job to temporarily fulltime to compensate. All part of the logic.

Scheduling is tougher for management than for workers, but easier than being a soccer mom scheduling multiple kids. I see managers doing the grunt work when shift workers are no-shows. As far as I am concerned, you can take your job benefits and flush them down the nearest toilet. Their real value is too often minimal, mostly hype. Most employer medical insurance was a mostly worthless, high-deductible farce even pre-Obamacare. I always did better on my own. Sick leave mostly benefits government employees, who cash it out as a lump sum as wages at retirement to boost pensions. Ditto vacation pay. Fulltime cradle to grave jobs with benefits is the traditional socialist worker’s paradise (i.e. Bernie Sanders, USSR, Eastern Europe). As my struggling friends who left Eastern Europe before the final collapse say, “We pretended to work, and they pretended to pay us.” Free and timely medical care in the Eastern European socialist workers paradise meant either paying doctors “bribes” or “forever waiting lists.” In other words, single-payer (government) free medical benefits were a theoretical illusion (communist propaganda that fooled the West).

Year over year charts of both the establishment data (PAYNSA) and the household data (LNU02000000 not seasonally adjusted) show a down trend since February 2015 and October 2014 respectively. Lower highs and lower lows.

I think the economy is past the halfway point in its business cycle and there may be many years left to go. In my opinion, the next contraction will be accompanied by social unrest, at best, if the decline is long even if not deep.

Just think about how much welfare will be required to keep how many people from desperation. I have repeatedly read that 30% of the population is receiving assistance and we are not even in a recession.

the real economy has been contracting since 2000, and real income has been falling since at least 1987.

all the ups&downs along the way were scenery for the tourists – printing fiat dollars buys plenty of propaganda & “special effects”.

The Fed caused – and is now trying to manage – the collapse of the American Standard of Living… and the collapse will continue until the $USD paradigm is exhausted.

The “end game” is a USA SoL on-par with the 3rd World, which is exactly where we are headed as the middle class is driven into extinction.

Without FT jobs, there is no middle class. Without a middle class, our Standard of Living sinks into the basement. I don’t see anything on the horizon (not even Trump) that could somehow shift/reverse this dynamic.

Correct – Social Security is not welfare – you pay in for old age insurance and when you reach that you will get paid plus interest. In the meantime the government borrowed billions from Social Security to pay tax cuts for the (you know) and faces now large payments due and the (you know) don’t want to pay higher taxes to fund that. Now its time to cut SS because it is now called welfare LOL

Sorry, but you’re confusing Obama with some mythical Leftist Saint. He’s nothing of the sort. The closest ‘thing’ to his politics that I can think of on short notice is an old fashioned 1960’s Republican. Bill Clinton has a lot of atoning for to do when he shows up at the Infernal Gates.

Lobbying, chasing ambulances, taking cuts of the theft that is asset pumping, and otherwise working on robbing and harassing others, aren’t exactly “supporting” anything, either. So the supports/leeches ratio is much more lopsided than 65/325, assuming (which is a bit of a stretch) than noone at all on government payroll does anything productive at all.

The chart shows it has taken about 10 years to get back down to about the low near the end of the previous economic expansion. 10 years to reach a target, again. A rather poor track record for the FED. Why is it that the FED can’t reach a target rapidly and keep it there for years on end, with full employment during most of the business cycle?

The Fed has tremendous leverage, and cannot be ended as long as USA.gov continues to add trillions to its cumulative deficit. The Fed could instantly make USA.gov officially insolvent if they threaten to pull the plug. Excessive debt is excessively evil, and the devil must be given its due. Debt and deficits have big consequences. Dick Cheney got it wrong when he said deficits do not matter. Cumulative deficits and unfunded liabilities assure the Fed a long life.

{{{There is a clear weakening pattern in establishment survey jobs from year to year.}}

Commentary from economists was completely the opposite. Also I was in NYC last weekend and I have never seen as much construction (both commercial & new apartments going up everywhere) and the stores & restaurants were packed. there is no sign of even an economic slowdown, however rents (especially in the outer boros and on Long Island and in Westchester county are spiking where $2,000 is the ‘new normal’ for a one room apartment out on long island or in yonkers.

In Manhattan and most of brooklyn & queens $3,000 – $7,000 a month (for rent) is the new normal. How these millenials afford this and afford monthly metrocard, car payment, parking, car insurance, utilities, and food I don’t know.

The comments regarding the jobs report on the radio & from mainstream economists were all along the lines of ‘solid’ & ‘spectacular’ and ‘biggest problem facing businesses today is not taxes, regulations, or sales (due to overwhelming demand shown by the 80% of S&P 500 companies that beat revenue estimates) but Lack of qualified applicants.

But every article or commentary that the mainstream media (especially CNN & Marketewatch.com is all is all targeted toward millenials (since everyone knows there is rampant age discrimination which is really code for white males over the age of 40) and now even CNBC is now moving toward the bleeding heart BS that most of the msm is putting out

Not quite that bad Nikolai. You can get studios for @ 1K a month, a bit less. A 2 bedroom will run about 2200-2500, depending on location and state of renovation. I agree that the better apartments, and those closer to transportation, will run up to 3K or so. Also, an apartment big enough for a family will cost more. I live in Queens, not too far from Manhattan, although transportation is either 2 fare or foot and subway here (or drive to subway). Also, a good tenant will pay less, often much less, if the landlord isn’t saddled with an idiotic mortgage; especially if they’ve been in the same place a while. Some of the houses right around me are getting to the million dollar mark for 2 and 3 family houses. It makes me want to cry, actually. I grew up around here. I think it’s a shame to see what’s going on. You need two incomes now.

These figures are contradictory as always. Professional and business services have shown the biggest rise this year. Much of the employment here is contracted out and takes the form of the self-employed. Recent figures for non-corporate income including sole proprietorships shows a sharp fall. So either these contractors are taking a cut in income, working less hours or the figures of rising employment in this industry do not compute. Given an economy that is barely crawling, where the goods production sphere is in recession, these employment figures do not make sense.

The government isn’t even enforcing state or federal labor laws being openly violated by illegal aliens and their employers. This forces contractors who are normally law-abiding to hire cheap illegal labor to stay competitive and remain in business

This is a brutal report! how in the world volunteering work, actually considered employment without pay? Writing to http://www.whitehouse.gov Dear Mr President I just read July part time full times employment report on Mishtalk.com. Come-on Man!!
Why continue Obama’s lie?

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